Google Kills the Google Bar it Never Launched – Just Tweaks the Old Black Navigation Bar Instead

Feb 9, 2012

Late last year, Google announced a new design for the navigation menu that sits at the top of virtually every Google product. A gray Google Bar with a drop-down menu hidden in the Google logo (the Google Menu) was supposed to replace the black bar, but that update never quite arrived. A few people saw the gray Google Bar now and then, but it was never rolled out consistently. Now we know why. Google just announced that it has gone back to the drawing board after it realized that "there were some elements of the new bar that we could improve."

Gone is the drop-down menu – which, when I had access to the gray bar for a while was indeed a user interface nightmare. Instead, Google is keeping the black navigation bar and is basically keeping the current design in place. What it will roll out to all users, though, is the unified search box and the Google+ sharing and notifications feature.

When Google announced the new design, there was no indication that this would be a very slow rollout and even when I asked Google about an update a few weeks ago, the company told me that it planned to roll the Google bar and menu out to all users "in the coming weeks." In a sense, I guess, that was true – though it's quite different Google bar the company is rolling out now.